CD The Agentic Era Needs a Network
Posted: Wed Sep 03, 2025 2:57 pm
AI is stepping onto the trading floor. Not as software, but as an actor. Agents don’t just analyze markets, they strike deals, set terms and move capital across decentralized rails where settlement is final. For institutional crypto desks, that means faster trades, better products and entirely new exposures.Now imagine two agents negotiating a derivatives contract but recording different numbers. One books $100 million, the other $120 million. Who is accountable when the gap triggers failures or investigations? This is not theory, it is the reality of the agentic era. AI learns, negotiates and acts inside financial systems where even small mismatches can create systemic risk.But there’s a growing problem: agents could be acting on false or unverifiable data with real consequences. One AI system used by the UK’s national healthcare provider misdiagnosed a patient, citing a fictitious “Health Hospital” with a fake postcode. As we move beyond basic automation, we need systems rooted in verifiability and accountability. Just like the web needed HTTPS, the agentic web needs a trusted network.Without a shared memory (also called ledger), agents diverge. Conflicting records create failures. Without audit trails, they become opaque, unaccountable, untrusted and consequently unfit for enterprise use.This isn’t a distant scenario. The infrastructure gap already exists. To navigate the agentic era, we need a foundation built on three core layers:
Source: https://www.coindesk.com/coindesk-indic ... -a-network
- Decentralized infrastructure: Eliminates single points of control, ensuring resilience, scalability but most importantly sustainability, beyond relying on single private entities to run the entire stack.
- A trust layer: Embeds verifiability, identity and consensus at the protocol level, enabling trusted transactions across jurisdictions and systems.
- Verified, reliable AI agents: Enforces provenance, attestations and accountability, ensuring systems remain auditable and enabling these agents to act on our behalf.
- Consensus (agree on what actually happened)
- Provenance (identify who initiated or influenced it and who approved it)
- Auditability (trace every step with ease)
Source: https://www.coindesk.com/coindesk-indic ... -a-network